Arthur Bliss, who was half-American on his father’s
side, studied at Cambridge with Charles Wood and also
found in Edward Dent a stimulating mentor. His studies
continued at the Royal College of Music and in 1912 he
met Elgar who encouraged his aspirations as a
composer. During the First World War he served with
distinction, and in the post-war years his career was
launched with a series of bold ensemble works, which
often exploited the voice, such as Conversations (1920)
and Rout (1920). These were deemed to be modernistic,
with the result that Bliss gained a reputation as an avantgarde
experimentalist, a view confirmed by his first
major orchestral work A Colour Symphony (1921-2).

From 1923 to 1925 Bliss lived in the United States,
where he married an American, Gertrude Hoffmann.
With his burgeoning domestic happiness his musical
language matured rapidly, as heard in the Oboe Quintet
(1927) and Pastoral (1928). In the early 1930s his
memories of the carnage of the trenches found musical
expression in the profound choral symphony Morning
Heroes (1930), while the Viola Sonata (1933) and the
Music for Strings (1935) demonstrated his mastery of
musical structures.

A characteristic of Bliss’s career was his many
collaborations with major artists of his day from other
genres. In 1934-5, for example, he composed the score
for Alexander Korda’s film Things to Come based on
H.G. Wells’s novel; it remains a classic score for the
medium and the suite drawn from it is one of Bliss’s
most popular works. Ballet was also an important
medium for him and he collaborated with Ninette de
Valois on Checkmate (1937) and Robert Helpmann on
Miracle in the Gorbals (1944) and Adam Zero (1946),
all three premières being conducted by Constant
Lambert. J.B. Priestley wrote the libretto for the opera
The Olympians (1948-9), and with Christopher Hassall
and Kathleen Raine he wrote the choral works The
Beatitudes (1962) and The Golden Cantata (1963)
respectively.

Bliss’s orchestral works include three concertos all
written for great performers, the Piano Concerto (1938-
9) for Solomon, Violin Concerto (1955) for Campoli,
and Cello Concerto (1970) for Rostropovich, as well as
the masterly Meditations on a Theme of John Blow
(1955) and the Metamorphic Variations (1972). His
formidable organisational talents were brought into play
as Director of Music at the BBC during the Second
World War and from 1953 until his death as Master of
the Queen’s Musick, a post to which he brought great
distinction. He was knighted in 1950 and his
autobiography As I Remember is a fascinating portrait
of his life and times.

After composing works with programmatic or
dramatic subjects, Bliss frequently felt the need to write
a purely abstract work. Hence the Second String Quartet
came in the wake of the opera The Olympians: as he
wrote in As I Remember, ‘I retreated into the intimate
and private world of chamber music’. He composed the
quartet in 1950 dedicating it to the members of the
Griller Quartet in honour of their twentieth anniversary
and they gave the première at the Edinburgh Festival
that year. Bliss felt that ‘it grew into the most
substantial chamber work that I had attempted’ and it is
indeed a powerful and rigorous essay in compositional
skill.

The first movement explodes into life with a
dramatic theme on the three upper strings marked by
trills. This theme informs much of the musical argument
that follows. A spacious chordal idea and one
percussive in character complete the first group of
themes. By contrast a new section commences with a
relaxed, flowing theme heard initially on the first violin.
The development reaches its climax with a forceful
statement of the chordal idea and in the recapitulation
the principal ideas are heard in a different scoring. Soft
dissonances, with the strings muted, open the Sostenuto,
which is contemplative in character. A short faster
section leads to a brooding climax and on to an
impassioned cello solo, unmuted, against the other
instruments playing tremolando still with their mutes
on. As if the music is suspended, a still threefold
repetition of the opening dissonance played pianissimo
concludes the movement.

Bliss described the third movement as having ‘the
spirit of a Scherzo’, and to be played ‘at top speed’. It
opens with a bounding rising arpeggio that dominates
this rhythmically energetic music. The brief trio-like
section is characterised by a dogged, insistent figure
played by the quartet in rhythmic unison. A fugato on
the arpeggio idea and a swinging viola solo follows,
before a second appearance of the trio where the viola
again takes centre stage set against the harmonics of the
violins and the cello’s pizzicato, providing a magical
and inspired transformation of its first appearance. The
finale is shaped from ideas heard in alternate tempos at
the outset. A series of descending chords usher in the
Larghetto and are followed by an elegiac viola solo. By
contrast the Allegro is marked by a purposeful theme
introduced by the first violin. Later in the movement the
Larghetto melody is played by both the first violin and
cello and it this theme which ends the quartet as a
whole, as in the very final bars the music comes to rest
serenely in the major rather than minor key.

As in many of Bliss’s works the inspiration of a
great artist was a powerful stimulus in the composition
of the Clarinet Quintet. In this instance it was Frederick
Thurston who, together with the Kutcher Quartet, gave
the first performance at the composer’s home in
December 1932. It was dedicated to Bliss’s friend the
composer Bernard van Dieren. Clearly Bliss loved the
clarinet, and significantly it was the instrument of his
brother Kennard, who had been killed in the First World
War. As the quintet was the next work to be composed
after Morning Heroes, Bliss’s overtly public requiem
for his beloved brother, it is possible to view it as a
further expression of his loss. Undoubtedly the work is
one of his finest achievements.

Like Mozart and Brahms in their clarinet quintets,
Bliss chose the A clarinet because of its silkier tones. In
a lecture of 1932 he described the instrument’s
qualities: ‘The clarinet has a curiously varied manner of
expression, being capable of sounding like three
different instruments. In its highest register it is brilliant
and piercing, with an almost pinched trumpet sound; in
its middle octave it is beautifully pure and expressive,
with a clear even tone; in its lowest register it is reedy in
sound, with a dark, mournful and rather hollow quality.
It is an immensely agile instrument, capable of extreme
dynamic range, extending to a powerful forte to the
softest pianissimo.’

The clarinet is heard to expressive effect at the
beginning of the first movement with an extended solo
cantilena. Gradually, in a manner that Bliss likened to a
conversation, the other instruments steal in tenderly
echoing the clarinet’s melody to produce a web of
luminous counterpoint. Surely for sheer beauty this
opening must rank among the most memorable in
twentieth-century chamber music? But, as often with
Bliss, the serenity which marks the first movement is
contrasted with altogether ominous moods in the
stabbing rhythms, martial-like fanfares and dissonances
of the succeeding dramatic scherzo. Contrast is
provided by a solo violin melody of aching poignancy,
which is followed by a pizzicato passage before the
drama returns. At the heart of the work is the pensive
slow movement which grows from the simple
syncopated violin phrase at the start. The full expressive
range of the clarinet is exploited in long florid lines and
decorated arabesques as the music quickens to a climax
in the movement’s centre. After this central point a
stately sarabande-like melody leads to a return of the
principal idea. In the predominantly carefree and
effervescent finale the brilliance of the clarinet’s upper
range is exploited. Shadows intrude intermittently in
more introspective sections, only to be banished once
and for all in the sparkling coda.